four stars, preachy, or lightweight

You get some idea about the anodyne treatment of climate change in Earthquakes in London from the reviews. The Daily Telegraph's critic describes himself as 'a crusty climate-change sceptic'. He gave the show four stars.

The American expat blogger Webcowgirl still found the play preachy:

if I want to read about climate change, all I have to do is pick up the paper any day of the week; it’s covered extensively in the news. I don’t go to the theater to hear this all over again: I go to learn about people and what makes them tick ...

This is a key point. Does Earthquakes add anything you couldn't read in the papers? Webcowgirl adds:

if you are very concerned about climate change you will probably find this a wonderful show.

Andrew from West End Whingers replies in a comment below:

I think if you are very concerned about climate change you will probably find this frustratingly lightweight and somewhat patronising.

I agree. But also, if you accept what the great majority of climate scientists are saying, then there isn't an opposition between 'climate change', on the one hand, and learning 'about people and what makes them tick', on the other. There's a relationship there. Only Earthquakes doesn't bring that to life.

see also: when it's not either/or, guess who? and 10 things you need to know about 'earthquakes in london' more ...

like minds

People with higher degrees who care about food and wine, support gay rights, and want few children but good Internet connections have been gravitating to urban centers on the two coasts, while churchgoing families that drive everywhere, socialize with relatives, and send their kids to state universities have been heading to the growing exurbs of the southern and mountain states.

Mark Lilla on how American voters are moving into 'communities of like-mindedness' more ...

believe the buildings

Archive on 4 considered Lord Clark, who wrote and presented the landmark BBC series Civilisation.

Five minutes in, Clark stands in front of Notre Dame and asks, 'what is civilisation'? He says he can't define it in the abstract ('yet'), but knows it when he sees it, and he can see it in front of him.

If I had to say which was telling the truth about society, a speech by a minister of housing, or the actual buildings put up in his time, I should believe the buildings. more ...

into neutral

To understand modern politics in Europe, writes Tom Holland, you have to understand Europe's Christian past

Neutrality, in the dimension of culture and religion, can never itself be a neutral concept: it is too much the product of Christian presumptions and history ever to rank as that. more ...

man and beast

If you thought Darwin was a dangerous thinker, the New Yorker reminds us that Machiavelli was equally controversial and just as misunderstood,

The Prince offered the first major secular shock to the Christianized state in which we still live. Long before Darwin, Machiavelli showed us a credible world without Heaven or Hell, a world of “is” rather than “should be,” in which men were coolly viewed as related to beasts and earthly government was the only hope of bettering our natural plight. more ...

ABC on scepticism

'Scepticism about climate change is still given astonishing prominence in some western media.' (Rowan Williams) more ...

lines clearly traced

It's not just that climate change is a very complicated issue, it also has another big drawback for playwrights and screenwriters: time lags. What we do today won't be visible for some time. What will be visible will be diffuse.

Perhaps the Protestant imagination is particularly resistant to climate change as a dramatic subject. (There was no such resistance to writing about the nuclear bomb.) In a recent book review, the novelist Claire Messud touched on the relationship between her own upbringing and the type of fiction it produces,

'Raised in an essentially Protestant setting, I had in youth absorbed, unawares, an essentially Protestant understanding of the world: one that strives for a rational grasp of events, one that espouses clarity, directness, and mastery. In fiction, this leads to largely linear narrative, in which the lines between cause and effect can be clearly traced, and in which, in spite of welcome complexity, there remains an underlying certainty of limits, boundaries, and order.'

Climate change is never going to offer all that. more ...

christian right

Pope Benedict XVI says nonviolence, sustainable development, justice and care for the environment are of vital importance.

We await a nuanced response from the White House to this. Unless, that is, His Holiness is onto something.

(Latest: Nancy Pelosi blasts the two oil men in the White House. Al Gore says we'll kick fossil fuels if we tax what we burn. Tidal water power turbine gets plugged in ... ) more ...

flight decked

The cover of London's Time Out magazine features a 'Green Londoner' with a spiky grass hairdo. Inside there's an A-Z on how to 'Green Up Your Act" and extracts from its 'Free-Flight Europe' guidebook (left).

There's also an interview with Richard Chartres, Bishop of London, who was quoted by the Sunday Times two years ago as saying that 'flying is a sin'. He later accepted a challenge to stop flying for a year. The bishop defends his remarks:

'To think of oneself as a sinner is very good news because actually it means you can change. To be a victim, you're powerless, that's it. We're not victims. We choose to be a certain way and we have a range of choices. If you're a believer, you recognise you have responsibility to your neighbour, that in this interconnected world, the way in which we live here is connected to water levels in Bangladesh.' more ...

far from the holy huddle

Evangelicals make up a quarter of the US population and four years ago nearly 80% of evangelicals voted for George W. Bush. But Frances Fitzgerald reports in the New Yorker that influential pastors have set a new national-policy agenda which is based on a slightly different understanding of the life of Jesus and his ministry to the poor, the outcast and the peacemakers.

These pastors and their congregations lack 'the fundamental resistance to modernist thought, such as distrust of science'. They also represent a shift from individual faith and mutual service ('the holy huddle') to serving the community as a whole. This has resulted, for instance, in the Environmental Climate Initiative, which states:

'Millions of people could die in this century because of climate change, most of them our poorest global neighbours.'

Fitzgerald writes, 'Of all the initiatives the new movement has taken, that on global warming has provoked the most fury from the right.' more ...

a little seasoning

There are blogs out there discussing a vision of theatre that is sustainable, decentralised and local (eg: here and here). But what about theatre that demonstrates another key environmental goal: seasonality? Most theatres' idea of seasonality is the Christmas panto.

Something has been lost when you know that you could see the same play done in pretty much exactly the same way at any time of the year. I'm not suggesting a theatre's season should start with Spring Awakening move onto Suddenly Last Summer and end with The Lion in Winter. I'm suggesting, as a very first step, that companies do more plays outdoors.

Not all plays, of course. There are formal qualities that make a play more of an 'outdoor' play than an 'indoor' one. It might be 'public' in its nature, it might not require a 'fourth wall', its dialogue might be essentially 'top-text', which would lend itself to a broader or rougher performance than a play that depended on the subtleties of 'sub-text'. Going to an indoor play, or 'winter play', then, would be a sharply contrasting experience to going to an outdoor or 'summer play'.

An outdoor promenade production, for instance, is not only likely to be quite different in content to a 'black-box' studio one, it also connects the theatre company and the audience to the surroundings in which it takes place.

Radio stations programme their content very carefully to reflect the stages of the day. Theatres rarely programme to reflect the stages of the year. To take another example, the Church calendar shows how intimately connected it is with seasonal changes: farmers could measure out their workload from Michaelmas to Candlemas to Andrewmas.

This is, of course, only one symptom of a much grander narrative. As Ted Hughes wrote, 'The story of the mind exiled from Nature is the story of Western Man.' When the mechanicals were planning their performance in front of Theseus and Hippolyta in A Midsummer Night's Dream, they looked in the almanac to check if the moon would be shining the night they played their play. Now there's a theatre company that's trying to maximise natural resources. more ...

one and only

Happy Easter.

This is the first Sunday after the full moon after the equinox. Well, that's the quick definition. Longer definition here.

No-one alive today will ever have Easter this early again. The next time it falls on 23rd March will be in 2160.

This year's vernal equinox, officially the first day of spring, made the front page of the Independent.

Mainly because it isn't what it was. more ...

thick and thin

In Break Through, their critique of environmentalism, Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger remark that many people who say they are concerned about the environment give less than $100 a year to environmental groups; in contrast, many evangelicals give 10% of their income to their church.

One reason the authors give for this big difference is 'the experiences the two groups create for themselves'. The church offers community, participation and a strong sense of identity: 'the evangelical identity is thick, the environmentalist identity is thin.'

A very similar observation is made in a blog discussion going on about the value of theatre. One Chicago blogger visits her in-laws' church in Texas and wonders: 'Why can't we and other theatres inspire that type of devotion?'

A comment that follows (from Scott Walters again) points out that the church is 'more people-oriented than product-oriented ... the congregation is the focus of the institution.' Much more here. more ...